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Adult Film Industry Moving To HD DVD
profet writes "One of the heavyweights in the war between BlueRay and HD DVD has chosen its format. Various members of the adult film industry have decided on HD-DVD. The article says the reasons seem to be based primarily on cost of manufacturing. History has shown that the porn industry can be a driving factor for technology, as it was in deciding for the VHS format over BetaMax." Heise reports that US BlueRay press plants are refusing the adult industry's business (in German).
In the previous discussions about pornography decided the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle, I'd always said that the porn industry was fully capable of going both ways, and a few others besides (with the double-entendre wholly intended).
However, hearing that Sony itself has been pressuring the porn industry away from the Blu-Ray format, it seems they've shot themselves in the foot and mooted their brand from competition.
I suspect they want to keep the format that is used in their gaming system free of purient-interest content and not be a portal for pornography, preserving it as a "kid friendly" device. And with a limited number of facilities able to produce BD disks compared to DVD houses refitted for HD-DVD production, that scarcity allows Sony more control. Perhaps Sony is still stinging with the parental backlash against kids putting porn on their PSPs. How many more PSPs to adults did that revelation sell again?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Sony blew their chances.
But a semi-serious question though: Have sales of porn movies decressed with the greater availability of online content?
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
Actually, (and this is legit) this was shot in HD, so I imagine it'll get a re-release soon enough. ;')
listing to 'this week in tech', last week and someone (Leo / Dvorak) was saying they visited the HD-DVD booth who's rep's were all about how movies can be filmed with 'skinable features'.. and gave the example of Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift where they got to select the color of the cars....
I think Leo went on to predict the Porn industry will win the race with this feature alone...
Slashdotters will be able to superimpose their own face over Ron Jeremy's and finally get to see themselves (albeit a hairy version) do nasty things to girlz.
Off topic - but does HD-DVD have a scratchproof layer like Blu-Ray licensed from TDK? (Based on my TDK scratchproof discs, this stuff works great and would influence my decision. I lost more than a few CDs/DVDs due to scratches).
And with a limited number of facilities able to produce BD disks compared to DVD houses refitted for HD-DVD production, that scarcity allows Sony more control.
And there is the problem, that also affects things like DRM: trying to control too much. The industry is so intent on controlling everything they own and not allow the indivual fair use, that they seem more ready to shoot themselves in the foot than letting have other people have any sense of using it a way that makes it worth while.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
No, it's not. VHS won because it had a longer running time and could therefore hold feature films. By the time BetaMax was able to support the longer running time, VHS had become the norm. People like storylines, and the porn industry driving VHS' success is a storyline they love to repeat regardless of its lack of truth.
Also, porn is an Internet thing now. It's free. Why would I care either way about HD-DVD or Blu-Ray porn?
"Sufferin' succotash."
I would like to call for the desistance of calling HD-DVD "technically inferior" on the simple-minded basis of its only very limitedly lower theoretical storage capacity. This seems to be a very popular thing to do by people who like to think they know what they are talking about. However, it is actually stupidly simplistic and inaccurate.
Blu-ray is capable of having some more storage capacity. Meanwhile, HD-DVD disks are cheaper to make, do not scratch as easily, are more backwards compatible, have a more capable and author friendly development environment/UI system, more advanced video encoding algorithms (as of at least very recently), and support the highest available resolution available (1080p)!
Apparently, what people mean by "technically superior" is "has a little more storage capacity". I prefer my way of looking at things -- HD-DVD is "better" and was more intelligently designed because it has all the advantages above over BluRay. It appears that Sony reinvented the wheel for negligible gain, yet many-fold setback.
BluRay needs the scratch resistant layer, because their data is stored at the edge of the disc, and without it is very succeptible to permenant damage. HD-DVD stores its data at the center of the disc, and if you do scratch it up, you can typically buff out the scratches without issue.
We have that title in the store i work in :), a video rental place. There's a softcore version, and the X rated version. The X rated version comes with both the DVD and HD-DVD version of the title. The softcore one is only a very edited DVD suitable for an R or 18A rating.
However, because of the title, it's put right beside Pirates of the Caribbean 2. I'd be a liar if I said unsuspecting parents never grabbed the wrong title on many occasions. Many, MANY irate phone calls have been received by me and my fellow staff due to this title, and it's entertaining every time :D.
... company. Japanese society has one of the most warped views on sexuality (I mean this in a good way :), and yet a Japanese company is anti-porn? That's just too funny.
Isn't high quality porn an oxymoron?
Check out titles by Michael Ninn. The first time we saw one it was by accident, channel surfing on cable. We had to double check which channel we were on because the production quality seemed to be too high to be the pr0n channel.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
What's with the massive anti-HD sentiment regarding porn? What happened when you guys see a woman in real life? Do you go "EWWWWWWW! She's so hi-def! I can see her pores!" Christ, if detail really turns you off that much why not just confine yourself to viewing hentai?
This is slashdot, after all.. Hentai is about as close to real women majority here has gotten so far.
And, hey, I read somewhere that 2/3 (or was it 1/2) of american men won't munch kitty. So this "help, HD, help"-sentiment doesn't surprise me at all. Here comes the real shocker: Some people do it with lights off!
How's that for twisted?
All joking aside, the success of any new communication technology depends on it being useful for a variety (preferably a broad variety) of different purposes. This isn't a particularly new observation, but I've documented evidence for it elsewhere. For better or worse, one purpose that is often seen as desirable is education. One that is frequently seen as undesirable is pornography. I understand the reasons for the the widely shared bias that leads to these judgments. I'm a fan of education and haven't much use for most of the things that are currently regarded as pornography.
It remains, however, that pornography is an important benchmark in the success of new media. I frequently summarize the nature of this benchmark (see, for example http://evolutionarymedia.com/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?WhyN ewMediaMatter) as three "laws of new media":
This pattern holds for a huge number of new media going back over 100 years. The nature of what has been deemed pornographic has changed along the way. Jazz, for instance, was once frequently described as pornographic. It was the porn of early records and broadcast radio. It remains that porn users are often one of the first mainstream sets of users to widely adopt new media, that their opinions and equipment purchases often drive other uses of the medium, and that the publicity generated by the anti-porn movement often raises awareness of the communication technology and its potentially useful applications.
I can understand SONY not wanting to invoke the wrath of the considerable anti-porn movement (religious, feminist, and otherwise), but history suggests that SONY is reducing BLU-Rays chances of success by taking a hard line on it.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
I know for a fact prOn producers used Beta machines. In the mid-80s I wrote the SW for the industry standard video cassette duplication system. These supported every video cassette duplicator available which included, besides VHS machines, Sony, Sanyo and NEC Beta machines. One of the problems cassette manufacturers had with Beta was that the duplicating machines weren't very robust. They were for the most part consumer electromechanicals in an industrial box. A large facility would have 5000+ machines, mostly VHS with some Beta, which could be partitioned into individual banks. Each of these banks would/could be duplicating different video. In order to have the quickest turnaround between runs employees on roller skates would skate down the banks taking cassettes from a shopping cart and shoving them into the rackmounted machines. There were only a few VHS machines that were rugged enough for this (Matsushita/Panasonic and JVC were the best, Sharps were worst) but there wasn't a Beta machine that would hold up.
Trivia: We called the Beta duplicators MastahBetas; the SuperBeta was called the SuperMastahBeta.